Acquiring a new customer is five times costlier than retaining an existing customer. – Forrester Research

70% of buying experiences are based on how the customers feel they are being treated. – McKinsey

A 5% increase in customer loyalty would increase the average profit per customer by 25% – 100%. – TheLoyaltyEffect

So,

What these 3 statistics tell us?

Customer retention is as important as customer acquisition

Customer’s buying pattern is largely depended on how customer is treated

Customer loyalty plays an important role in any business

But,

There is a problem here.

How to run such highly customer centric business every time?

The solution is…

You must streamline all business processes and take a systematic approach to achieve this.

And do you know – what is that systematic approach?

Yes! It’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

So,

What does CRM stand for?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a technology that helps business to retain existing customers, capture new customers and improve customer loyalty. It automates various business processes to overcome challenges like high client attrition rate, sales decline, non-systematic sales approach and dissatisfaction of stakeholders.

Okay,

CRM consists of 3 basic elements –

Customer

Relationship and

Management

CRM = Customers + Relationship + Management.

1. Customer

Customer is an individual or a business that consumes products and services from another business and pays for it.

And we all know that customer is the sole reason for existence of any business.

Customers can be categorized in 4 types –

B2C (Business–To-Customer), for example you buy groceries from a super store

B2B (Business-To-Business), for example XYZ company hires a software company to develop a mobile app

C2B (Customer-To-Business), for example an individual sells his gold coin to a jewelry shop

C2C (Customer-To-Customer), for example an individual sells a product or service to another individual.

It does not matter what kind of business you run,

Primary goal of any business is to know customers well, give best fit products or services and build a strong relationship.

2. Relationship

You probably heard this thousand times before – ‘Customer is always right‘.

3. Management

You also know, it is important to build trust and mutual beneficial relationship.

But without proper management, it is an impossible task.

Your sales, marketing and service team generate a flood of valuable customer data.

But

Do you know how to use data efficiently to manage customers better?

How to get more business from existing customers?

How to make customers happier than your competitors?

This is where CRM comes. It manages your customers and their relationships.

So,

What is CRM Software?

CRM is a strategy with technology to integrate various business units to perform only one goal – serve customer better. It manages your customers, relationships and interactions and ultimately increases sales.

Suppose a sales person of XYZ Company wants to cross sell a product to a customer.

But as sales team works independently of service team, he has no idea that the customer is not happy with the existing product.

Customer has already logged an issue and called many times to service team to fix it. But till now he did not get any good solution. Every time he calls, different service agent picks up the call and gives different solution.

You may have already faced such situation, I did once.

Anyway,

Do you think – customer will be interested to buy a new product from XYZ Company anymore?

Never!

Moreover,

That customer will talk about bad customer service and advise others not to buy anything from XYZ company.

So what should be the first step for XYZ company to fix this problem?

See,

Solution is pretty straightforward.

XYZ Company must streamline business processes using CRM.

Now,

You may ask what makes CRM different from other software.

Well,

There is a difference (probably THE MOST IMPORTANT difference).

In CRM, customer is always in the center and data is stored in a single database.

You see how this simple concept can fix the problems that XYZ Company is facing.

So customers of XYZ company do not need to explain their problems every time.

This also helps service agents to know the history of the issue without asking same questions to the customer.

It solves the problem faster and makes customer happy.

Not only that, even management of XYZ company can use it to build strategy for better customer service or internal training.

Second,

As data is stored in a single database, sales team can easily check customer’s current status before making any up/cross sales call. This knowledge helps sales team to decide what kind of product customer may be interested in.

Customer retention, cross and up selling opportunity, team collaboration are just few benefits that business can get from CRM.